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L'economie heretique: Canadian economics before 1967

Description

Citation

Title

L'economie heretique: Canadian economics before 1967

Author(s)

Robin Neill, Gilles Paquet

Date

1993

Volume

26

Issue

1

Start page

3

Abstract

Canadian economics was heretical from its beginnings. It was the voice of the politically and economically not yet established, a voice trying to develop a sort of economics capable of helping them to deal with the particular problems of a small, open, balkanized, and dependent economy. The Canadian economics discourse that dominated the scene until the 1950s had a number of salient features, including: 1. It focused on long-run and dynamic factors in discontinuous and irreversible economic development. 2. It put much emphasis on constituent values and on institutions. 3. It favored a meso-analytical perspective. After World War 2, with the accelerated integration of the economies of Canada and the US, the profession came to accept itself as part of a North American establishment, and eventually this ceased to be the case. There was an explosion of Canadian economists but an implosion of Canadian economics.